Study: Pentagon Facebook pages easily confused with ‘clones’

Defense officials promise to release more concrete details about that policy after completing another 180-day review. But one of the early challenges they must surely address in their guidelines is the slew of Facebook fan pages that resemble official Pentagon sites, yet have no real affiliation with the military.

Janson found that a surprising number of Facebook users commented on the “clone” profile pages, not the military’s official Facebook sites. Consequently, they recommended the Defense Department better label its official content on the popular social network.

Nevertheless, it is hardly the only obstacle Pentagon officials will confront in implementing their new policy. A Pentagon spokesman told reporters Tuesday that bandwidth constraints on the military’s broadband network — especially in war-torn states like Afghanistan — may sometimes require commanders to cut off troops’ access to resource-hogging sites.

But he nonetheless stressed the Defense Department would eventually iron out those kinks.

“I think, though, people will find quickly, as I did, as I started using it, the benefits of using this as a communication tool,” Floyd later added, noting a change in military culture was under way.